Web Designed To Aggravate Adults

JAMES COATES Binary Beat

The Younger Generation Has Accepted The World Wide Wait

Somewhere out there is a reader who has never gone to work with a hangover. I say we find that person and make her president of the United States.

The only flaw such a president might have would be a lack of prior personal experience of the symptoms that hit all of us _ teetotalers included _ when we get mugged by our computers.

The rest of us know the Binary Black Shakes all too well: The trembling hands, the knot in the tummy, the jangled nerves, the futile rage at a box of plastic and glass, the sudden urge to adjust the floppy drive with a ball-peen hammer.

It's a phenomenon that was touched upon last time in this space, a megabyte malady that author David Shenk calls the ''black shakes'' in his new HarperEdge book Data Smog about the perils of sensory overload from using computers.

I swiped the expression from Shenk, saying that if we don't lick it, it just might lick us.

If you think that dwelling on the black shakes is a bit overwrought, consider last week's announcement by the Washington, D.C.-based Software Publishers' Association that since January, the percentage of American homes with at least one personal computer has grown from 34 percent of all households to 38 percent.

The great majority of the roughly 90 million people who live in those households either already have endured a bout of the black shakes or they soon will.

Consider, for example, The 1997 American Internet User Survey also released last week by the research firm FIND/SVP, showing that 31.3 million adults are regular users of the Internet's World Wide Web.

No matter how fast their new computers might be and no matter how high-speed their Internet connections, all 31 million of these folks found out within minutes of their first log-on why they also call it the World Wide Wait.

The Web actually is designed to make you wait. It is overloaded with traffic and based on a software standard called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) that continually breaks up what is sent to your computer into small bits called packets, which move about helter-skelter on the Internet and then must be reassembled when they reach your machine.

The Internet software that does this just loves to call up the hourglass cursor from hell to spin mindlessly before your eyes while the computer does its stuff behind the scenes.

Which brings me to some brilliant e-mail I got last week from Brent L. Garner, technology instructor at Niles North High School in Skokie, Ill., who pointed out that it is only when we older folks remember how we did things the old-fashioned way that our computers make us crazy.

Kids who have grown up over the past decade consider using computers to be the old-fashioned way.

It's we older folks who tighten up when the screen locks up and the cursor turns into a useless twirling hourglass as we wait for the network to catch up with traffic and let us log on for a crucial file.

If you're 18 or maybe 20 and certainly if you're 14 or younger, the twirling hourglass is the way things are supposed to be.

We gaffers clench our jaws in frustration and sometimes even rage as we remember how we used to get such stuff out of a drawer in a big tin box called a filing cabinet.

We moved at our pace, not at that set by some accursed machine. When we got to the filing cabinet, the cabinet was there physically to touch and feel. It wasn't some collection of electrons and glowing pixels called a ''directory'' and printed on a TV screen called a monitor.

You could put your nose up against a tin filing cabinet and smell it. It smelled of paper and mildew and history.

All computers, of course, smell alike. They smell like ozone and cheap television sets in a back aisle at Kmart.

Anyway, with an honest to goodness physical filing cabinet, there was no waiting for the computer to call up a directory and display it on a glowing headache-producing video screen.

Our hands didn't shake while retrieving those Gutenberg files from a tin box because we were using those hands to reach out and touch the physical manila folder and maybe to reach inside and extract a typewritten page that we could read instantly.

Contrast that to a computer where you must click on an icon for a folder and then click on yet another icon representing that typewritten page.

The computer grinds a bit and the hourglass, which signifies a wait, begins spinning while the machine calls up the word processing software or spreadsheet or whatever application you need to read and work with whatever document you picked from the folder.

After waiting for the computer to do all this on its own time, it is only human nature to remember fondly the old way of doing things.

Here, thanks to Garner, is where we break new ground about something that is getting very old indeed, computer-bred frustration.